Food products, such as meat, cheese and the like, are conventionally packaged in plastic bags at workstations. The bags are supplied to a workstation in a bag assembly in which lead ends of the bags adhere to tape strips and trailing ends overly each other. The tape strips are fed to the workstation and the bags are removed from the tape strips for use.
Packaged food products must carry date and product source information. This information is conventionally printed on the bags in the bag assembly before reaching the workstation. A printer prints information on exposed sides of the bags in the bag assembly. The bags overlap each other so that the surface on a bag exposed for printing extends longitudinally along the bag assembly from the end of an overlying, downstream bag to the end of the bag being printed. The spacing of the bags along the strips is not necessarily uniform, thus making reliable printing difficult.
Glatfelter, Jr. U.S. Pat. No. 6,837,023, application Ser. No. 10/880,208, filed Jun. 29, 2004, issued Jan. 4, 2005 and assigned to the common assignee of this application, and which is incorporated herein by reference, discloses an improved bagger which reliably prints product information on bags independently of the spacing of the bags along the bag assembly. The bagger individually senses the location of a bag in the assembly, stops the feed of the assembly past a bag printer, and prints all required information on the bag.
The bagger disclosed in the Glatfelter, Jr. patent feeds the bag assembly to a work surface at the workstation. A bag is supported on the work surface and is opened by an air blast for inserting product into the bag. The bagger is intended for high-production workstations where product is automatically bagged and sealed.
There still remains a need, however, for a bag dispenser that supplies printed bags that can be manually removed from the bag assembly as needed. For example, large cuts of meat often cannot be packaged with automatic baggers, nor can work surfaces be provided at all existing workstations. The bag dispenser should reliably print product data on bags supplied to a work station to be manually removed from the bag assembly as needed.